José Martí: A Revolutionary Life (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)

By Alfred J. López

“The one and only book that treats the nineteenth-century Cuban figure José Martí as a human instead of an idol, an apostle, or an unblemished personality.” —Tom Miller, author of Revenge of the Saguaro
 
José Martí (1853–1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the “Great Liberator” Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the “apostle” of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint.
 
In José Martí: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, López traces the full arc of Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Ríos. The first major biography of Martí in over half a century and the first ever in English, José Martí is the most substantial examination of Martí’s life and work ever published.
 
“The life, the history and the facts are all here in López’s volume.” —The Washington Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780292759350

Book preview

JOE R. AND TERESA LOZANO LONG SERIES IN LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINO ART AND CULTURE

José Martí

A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE

By Alfred J. López

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2014 by Alfred J. López

All rights reserved

First edition, 2014

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

López, Alfred J., 1962–

José Martí: a revolutionary life / by Alfred J. López. — First edition.

    pages     cm. — (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-292-73906-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Martí, José, 1853–1895.   2. Revolutionaries—Cuba—Biography.   3. Statesmen—Cuba—Biography.   4. Cuba—History—1878–1895.   I. Title.

F1783.M38L5769   2014

972.91'05092—dc23

[B]

2014012771

doi:10.7560/739062

ISBN 978-0-292-73907-9 (library e-book)

ISBN 9780292739079 (individual e-book)

For Susan, wife, best friend, and honorary Cuban

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. Mariano and Leonor

Part One: BEFORE THE FALL (1853–1870)

CHAPTER ONE. An Unlikely Prodigy

A Boy’s First Letter

CHAPTER TWO. The Teacher Appears

CHAPTER THREE. Trial by Fire

Havana Farewell

Part Two: EXILE (1871–1880)

CHAPTER FOUR. Spain

CHAPTER FIVE. A Young Man’s Travels

CHAPTER SIX. Discovering America (1): Mexico

A Secret Mission

CHAPTER SEVEN. Discovering America (2): Guatemala

CHAPTER EIGHT. Homecoming, Interrupted

Part Three: THE GREAT WORK (1881–1895)

CHAPTER NINE. New York (1): A False Start

In the Land of Bolívar

CHAPTER TEN. New York (2): No Country, No Master

CHAPTER ELEVEN. New York (3): The Great Work Begins

CHAPTER TWELVE. New York (4): The Final Push

CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Farewells and Rowboats

A Narrow Escape—and One Last Letter for His Patria

CHAPTER FOURTEEN. My Life for My Country

EPILOGUE. A Hero’s Afterlife

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

IT IS INDICATIVE OF NORTH AMERICANS’ LACK OF INTEREST in the rest of their hemisphere that José Martí, a giant of Latin American politics and letters, remains unknown in the United States. Martí was the founding father of not only Cuban independence but a broader pan-American vision of freedom and democracy. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the Great Liberator Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Yet among Americans, most of whom could easily pick Fidel Castro or Ricky Ricardo out of a line-up, relatively few would even recognize Martí’s name.

Among Latin Americans and U.S. Latinos, however, Martí is a household name. Since his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, his legacy has overtaken the facts and foibles of his life, rendering the man who lived and died for the dream of Cuban independence the outsized hero, martyr, Apostle, and founding father that every Cuban—and Cuban American—boy and girl knows today.

In today’s Cuba, Martí is inescapable. His face appears on Cuba’s onepeso note (figure 0.1). An enormous Martí statue originally commissioned by Castro’s predecessor Fulgencio Batista presides over Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, the Castro regime’s favorite site for speeches and rallies (figure 0.2). Martí’s name also adorns both Havana’s airport and Cuba’s national library. Nor do such displays come at the expense of his written work. Cuba’s Centro de Estudios Martianos (Center for Martí Studies), founded in 1977, is a state-supported agency dedicated to the study and dissemination of Martí’s work. Tens of thousands have visited such public Martí shrines as his Havana birthplace and the former site of the Spanish prison where the adolescent Martí was incarcerated.

Beyond these major Martí sites, even the casual observer cannot help noticing the ubiquity of Martí’s face, name, and words reproduced in settings from small-town squares to baseball stadiums to private shrines in people’s homes. A similar wealth of Martís awaits the visitor to Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where Martí busts, photos, and calendars abound. In South Florida’s Cuban American community, Martí’s name and face adorn everything from grocery stores to Cuban cafeterías, a public park, and even a chain of private schools. The exile community’s favorite AM radio station, the top-rated WQBA (La Cubanísima—literally The Most Cuban), still features quotations from Martí at the top of every hour, and its talk hosts routinely refer to Fidel Castro as El Tirano (The Tyrant). Monuments and statues of Martí and other Cuban heroes abound, as well as parks: Máximo Gómez Park, the Bay of Pigs Memorial, and, of course, José Martí Park, site of its namesake’s birthday celebration every year (figure 0.3). The city boasts dozens of codesignated streets named after Cuban heroes: from Ignacio Agramonte to Lolo Villalobos, every Cuban body who was anybody has his or her name prominently displayed on a street sign.¹ Martí himself has two. Miami’s Lincoln-Martí Schools are dedicated to the mission of educating the future of our community, both academically and socially.

FIGURE 0.1. Cuba’s one-peso note, with Martí’s face prominently displayed.

FIGURE 0.2. Fidel Castro delivering a speech in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución at the foot of an enormous statue of Martí. From Fidel Castro, José Martí: El Autor Intellectual (Centro de Estudios Martianos. Havana: Editora Política, 1983).

Even Martí’s most fervent devotees, however, have historically known little of the icon’s life beyond the sanitized mythologies disseminated by Cuban governments and the exile communities that jealously guard his legacy. The resulting accretion over more than a century of mythmaking, appropriations, and outright falsehoods has done both Martí and his followers a tremendous disservice. In the process of gilding his legend for their own political purposes, scholars and ideologues have simplified and dehumanized Martí, ironically reducing the man’s internal contradictions and complexities even as they have inflated him to his iconic status.

Much of the Martí legend has necessarily grown to fill strategic vacuums in what we know about him. As he was an active revolutionary, it is not surprising that key parts of his private and politically sensitive writings have been destroyed either by his own direction or the initiative of well-meaning supporters. But this alone does not account for the cherry-picking and selective blindness that has plagued Martí scholarship for more than a century. More recently, fifty years of ideological warfare between the Castro regime and the Cuban diaspora have produced two politically incompatible Martís—one an atheist Marxist revolutionary, the other a pro-U.S. capitalist—while colluding in the shared task of concealing the more unsavory aspects of his life from the larger public. Martí’s many biographers have only deepened this chasm by hewing faithfully to one side or the other of the Havana-Miami divide. As a result, many of those who today profess to love Martí know little of his life and works beyond official, politically managed versions.

JOSÉ JULIÁN MARTÍ Y PÉREZ (1853–1895) WAS THE FOUNDING hero of Cuban independence and stands among the half-dozen most important Latin Americans of the nineteenth century. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, he was a giant of Latin American letters whose poetry, essays, and journalism rank among the canonical texts of their time. As a poet he pioneered Latin American modernismo, with works such as Ismaelillo (1882) and Versos sencillos (1891) considered masterpieces. His work as a foreign correspondent appeared in South America’s most respected newspapers of the 1880s and stand today among the most important journalism of the Gilded Age. Martí published four plays, a novel, and a newspaper, Patria, which served as the independence movement’s official publication. He worked at various points as an editor and translator, a secondary teacher and university professor, and a diplomat. His collected works fill twenty-six volumes, and previously unknown writings still are emerging.

Martí’s life falls into three distinct phases: childhood and adolescence in Cuba (1853–1870); first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala (1871–1878); and mature revolutionary period in New York City (1881–1895). Martí’s exile from Cuba occurred after his arrest and imprisonment for conspiracy against Spain. He spent his first four years abroad in Madrid and Zaragoza, where he earned a law degree. After graduation he rejoined his family in Mexico City but fled the country after the rise of dictator Porfirio Díaz. While in Mexico Martí met Carmen Zayas Bazán and married her in 1877, then took her to Guatemala, where he had immigrated. But political disagreements with President Justo Rufino Barrios forced the couple to leave the country. After an abortive attempt to resettle in Havana after the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), Martí lived his last fifteen years in New York. By the 1880s New York had a sizable exile community and a history of Cuban activism, making it an ideal base for Martí’s revolutionary aspirations.

FIGURE 0.3. Bust of José Martí in Miami Beach.

Although he was virtually unknown in Cuba when he died in battle in 1895, by the 1930s Martí had become Cuba’s apostle of independence, his name synonymous with Cuban nationalism. Generations of Cuban governments further burnished his legend, which reached its apogee with the 1959 Cuban Revolution’s claim to Martí as its primary inspiration. The emigration of hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing the revolution spread Martí’s fame to the United States and Europe. Martí is, in fact, perhaps the one subject on which Cuban exiles and Fidel Castro agree, as the Cuban leader long claimed Martí as the crucial inspiration and intellectual author of the revolution. Although Martí was not a Latino in the contemporary sense, his lived experience of exile and life in the United States have since made him a key figure in the history of Latin American immigration to the United States and the forging of Latino/a identities.²

ALTHOUGH BOOKS AND ESSAYS ON MARTÍ BEGAN APPEARING shortly after his death in 1895 and continue to abound, most of the published biographies are hagiographies, few attempting serious critical evaluation of his life and work. This is primarily because Martí’s biographers generally strive less to examine or critique him than to praise him in the interests of ideologically slanted mythmaking. At least two Martí biographies, Alberto Baeza Flores’s Life of José Martí (1954) and Luis Toledo Sande’s Basket of Flames: A Biography of José Martí (1996), were directly subsidized by Cuban administrations, and earlier biographers such as Jorge Mañach and Félix Lizaso held ministerial positions in the Batista government.³ Other Martí biographies, among them Raúl García Martí’s Family Biography and Gonzalo de Quesada’s Martí, the Man (both 1940), are the products of authors with close personal links to Martí.⁴ It is worth noting that the first serious scholarly biography of Martí, by Carlos Márquez Sterling, was not published in Havana or the United States but in Argentina.⁵

Decades of ideological warfare between the Cuban government and U.S.-based exiles in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution have deepened this problem, in effect producing two incompatible versions of Martí to suit their respective ideological imperatives. Much of the posthumous mythology that has grown around Martí is the direct result of such skewed writings, as scholars and ideologues have avoided the internal contradictions and complexities of his writings for their own—or their patrons’—political purposes.

THIS BOOK AIMS TO CHANGE ALL THAT, DESPITE THE FACT that, professionally speaking, I have no business writing a biography of José Martí. I am a professor of literature, by training neither a biographer nor a historian. My primary academic training is in twentieth-century literature, so I cannot even claim formal expertise in the century during which Martí lived and died. Being Cuban American doesn’t necessarily count as a credential either, any more than being born in Virginia would qualify me to write about George Washington. Yet it is precisely my unfamiliarity with the ways I was supposed to have read and interpreted Martí that has enabled me to write this book.

As the son of Cuban exiles, born at the height of the Cuban missile crisis and raised in Miami, once the most culturally Cuban city on earth outside of the island, I have in a sense spent my entire life preparing to write this book. Yet, during much of my adult life, including the crucial years of graduate study, I have lived away from Miami and Cubanness. I now realize this distance was necessary because it has given me the outsider’s perspective necessary to do justice to my subject, who was himself an exile. Paradoxically, only because I no longer live or work in Miami can I now write this book.

CUBANS ON THE ISLAND AND IN EXILE CLING TO THE CENTRALITY of their shared hero’s words and image, making Martí not only a central figure in Cuba’s history but a key ideological weapon in the battle over its future. Some myths develop from necessity—for keeping a community and its dreams alive. The myth of Martí has served precisely this function for postrevolution Cuba and the Cuban American community established in its wake. Yet to remain useful, any such myth must withstand scrutiny and more than scrutiny. It must survive its own undoing to show its devotees that they and the truths that bind them together are greater than the lies they have sometimes had to tell for the sake of unity.

For at least a century now, Cubans on the island and across the planet have revered Martí as more than a founding national hero. To them he is a mythic figure, practically a national saint: the intellectually gifted, righteous Apostle of freedom who overcame poverty, colonization, prison, exile, physical duress, mental anguish, and the combined efforts of two empires to achieve the impossible. My sling is the sling of David, Martí writes in his final, unfinished letter from the Cuban front, a phrase Cubans have used as a rallying cry ever since.⁶ Yet perhaps the most remarkable—and overlooked—hallmark of Martí’s greatness, of his undeniable status as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest political, cultural, and literary minds, is the degree to which he triumphed over his own physical, psychological, and moral limitations as a human being. Through it all—imprisonment, illness, exile, immigration, cultural isolation, emotional estrangement, and his own insecurities and self-perceived shortcomings—José Martí worked, struggled, and prevailed.

This book, then, tells the story of how one brilliant, troubled, flawed man lived and died to free his people from centuries of subjugation and bring them into the light of modernity. It moves chronologically through Martí’s life, from the child’s burgeoning awareness of Cuba’s subjugation to the adolescent’s first explicit acts of rebellion, his imprisonment and exile; from the young man’s restless travels and eventual arrival in New York to his ascendance as the revolution’s preeminent leader; from the last frantic struggle to launch a revolution, to his death on a Cuban battlefield. Beyond these events, which Martí’s many biographers have generally recognized as highlights of his life and career, this book also calls attention in five interchapters to some less celebrated, even overlooked moments that I consider crucial ones for Martí. The book focuses on these separately from the main chapters not to marginalize them but precisely to bring them the attention they have not received in earlier biographies.

I hope that you will be generous in your judgment of this volume, not because its author deserves a better fate than any other, but because its subject does. Contrary to the beliefs of those who would whitewash their icons and protect them from scrutiny, I believe that the careful examination of Martí’s life can only enhance his stature as one of the nineteenth century’s true artistic and intellectual giants. I have written this biography out of a long-standing conviction that the life of José Martí was one deeply worthy not merely of our respect and esteem but of our attention. This biography is not ideologically or otherwise beholden to the imperatives of Havana or Miami; thus it can represent Martí in all of his cultural, political, and personal complexity, a comprehensive portrait that I believe will, at long last, do him justice. This book will no doubt enrage partisans on both sides of the Cuban ideological divide. That, however, is a small price to pay for the chance to reintroduce José Martí to generations of readers who remain unaware of his true stature and worth. They, and he, deserve no less.

Acknowledgments

I PONDERED WRITING THIS BOOK FOR MANY YEARS BEFORE setting out to actually do it. The first step, although I did not recognize it at the time, was a chapter on Martí in my dissertation at the University of Iowa. That chapter later appeared as a stand-alone essay in Cuban Studies 33 (2002) and served as the point of departure for my 2006 book José Martí and the Future of Cuban Nationalism. I am thus obliged to many who read parts or all of that earlier work, including Peter Nazareth, Cheryl Herr, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Lisandro Pérez, Jorge Camacho, and Emilio Bejel. The help and encouragement of Joseph Urgo and Lois Parkinson Zamora became indispensable later, as I took the first fitful (or fateful) steps toward researching and writing the biography.

I am also deeply indebted to Orlando José Hernández and Lucinda R. Zoe, directors of the 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Visions of Freedom for the Americas: Eugenio María de Hostos and José Martí in Nineteenth-Century New York at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. My admission to the seminar exposed me to scholars, perspectives, and resources without which this book would not exist in its present form. It was at Hostos that summer that I was fortunate to meet Tom Miller, whose erudition, friendship, and good humor have left their indelible mark on these pages. Among other Martí scholars with whom I have corresponded as I developed this project, Manuel A. Tellechea and Miguel Fernández especially stand out for their insight, critical eye, and willingness to share what they know with a relative newbie.

My agent, Jason Ashlock of Moveable Type Management, saw the importance of a new Martí biography early on and shepherded me through the onerous proposal process. He and his assistant Craig Kayser have been great allies for this project and my work generally, for which I am deeply grateful.

I am likewise grateful for the generous support of Purdue University’s Center for Humanistic Studies that freed me from teaching duties as I researched this project in 2008. A Purdue Library Scholars Grant funded my travel to archives and libraries during this crucial period.

I owe a special debt of thanks to Gustavo Pérez Firmat, whose long-distance mentorship has been invaluable for many years now. His guidance and support as I conceived and developed this biography are a major reason for my success in completing it.

I am also grateful to University of Texas Press manuscript editor Lynne Chapman and freelance copyeditor Tana Silva; thanks to their hard work and diligence, this is a much more readable book than it would otherwise have been.

It will be clear to anyone who has studied or written about Martí that any single account of his life will have to navigate the vast body of work published by hundreds of scholars over the past one-hundred-plus years. This book would have been impossible without the enormous amount of primary research published by Cuban and Cuban American scholars who have delved into every conceivable aspect of Martí’s life and times. Astute readers will note one particular name that figures prominently in this book’s bibliography. Carlos Ripoll (1922–2011) was the preeminent Martí scholar of his time, a tirelessly prolific researcher whose work on Martí remains unmatched for quality and range of vision. Although I have not always agreed with Ripoll’s conclusions regarding certain aspects of Martí’s life, I owe him a great debt for the substantial contribution his lifetime of work has made to this book.

But most of all, I owe an unrepayable debt to my wife, Susan, to whom I have dedicated this book. More than anyone, she has shared with me the joys and frustrations of writing it and has been my strength and best counsel throughout.

INTRODUCTION

Mariano and Leonor

In Cuba, the son has received his first counsel on pride and independence from his Spanish father.

NUESTRAS IDEAS (OUR IDEAS), MARCH 14, 1892

JOSÉ JULIÁN MARTÍ Y PÉREZ WAS BORN IN THE EARLY morning hours of January 28, 1853, an unseasonably cold day.¹ He was born on the second floor of the small house his proud parents, Mariano and Leonor Martí, shared with her sister Rita’s family. The house was situated on the outskirts of Old Havana a few blocks from the sea. There was no heat aside from a small wood stove in the kitchen. Those present at the birth—his aunt Rita, an unknown midwife, and the child’s parents—kept the windows shuttered against the damp chill of that January morning.² There already would have been significant traffic along Calle Paula even at that early hour: a motley assortment of clergymen and sailors, clerks, soldiers, and sellers carrying their wares to market. Young beatas (devotees) were on their way to the nearby church. Everyone was bundled up against the biting cold of the damp, seaside winds. None in the street would have had any way of knowing that a child was being born so close by. None would have had any reason to remark on the event, as children were generally born at home. Yet not a single person in the street below would fail to be touched by the child being born in that unassuming second-story bedroom.

Mariano and Leonor were a fairly typical, if relatively affluent, military colonial couple; only she was born into the Spanish military life and culture. Mariano was the first on his side of the family to join the army; Leonor was the third of five children born to Antonio Pérez, a highly decorated sergeant and infantryman whose two other daughters married Spanish military men.³

Although the new parents were loyal Spaniards, the different regions in which they grew up colored their respective early relationships to their mother country. The Pérezes were a firmly middle-class family, and Antonio Pérez owned various properties in their native Canary Islands. The men of the Pérez family could also read and write—a rarity in a region where nearly 90 percent of the population was illiterate.⁴

The Canary Islands archipelago was one of Spain’s oldest colonial possessions and had for centuries been an important outpost for Spanish traffic to the New World. The islands’ remoteness and distance from the Iberian Peninsula, however, rendered it little more than a way station for Spanish ships and a convenient source of cheap labor and willing military conscripts. The islands’ proximity to northern Africa meant that mainland Spaniards viewed the islanders as racially and culturally inferior. These factors, along with hard times due to Spain’s single-crop economic policy for the islands, led to massive migration from the Canary Islands to Cuba and Puerto Rico throughout the nineteenth century.⁵

Young Leonor was by all accounts a respectful, disciplined, and devout child who attended church regularly and who never visibly chafed against the rigors of her strict military and Catholic upbringing. The outwardly compliant daughter, however, harbored a keen and fiercely intelligent mind. Spanish girls of the time were generally forbidden to learn to read and write for fear that they would correspond with undesirable suitors. As a teenager, however, the otherwise obedient Leonor taught herself to read and write without her parents’ knowledge, apparently the only one of the female Pérez siblings to do so.⁶

If her father’s and brothers’ literacy was unusual, Leonor’s constituted nothing less than a miracle in a land where few women beyond royalty and the very wealthy ever learned such skills. That she did so on her own, without her parents’ support or even approval, demonstrates her natural intelligence. It also suggests a pragmatic and resourceful woman who learned early on the wisdom of working within the limitations placed on young women of her class.

In September 1842, Antonio Pérez requested and received a commission in the artillery brigade of Havana. The Pérez family—including fourteen-year-old Leonor—left the Canary Islands for Cuba in November 1843. Leonor’s elder sisters, Joaquina and Rita, had married Spanish artillerymen assigned to Havana and were already raising families there. Although no explicit reason for Pérez’s transfer appears in his records, it is likely that the career soldier wished to live closer to his married daughters and grandchildren.⁷

Unlike Leonor, Mariano Martí had no family history of military service. He was the third of six children born to Vicente Martí, a farmer and rope maker, and María Martí Navarro. Mariano enlisted in the Spanish army in 1835 at age twenty, likely as a way to escape the lifelong poverty and lack of opportunity that almost invariably awaited young men of his class. His father and elder brothers displayed no interest in or affinity for the military life, but for Mariano 1835 proved an opportune year for ambitious and able-bodied young men to pursue military careers. By the time of his enlistment the Spanish Empire was in steep decline, its once-vast holdings reduced to Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and a handful of smaller possessions in the Pacific.⁸ The Spanish economy was still in shambles from the Peninsular War against Napoleon (1808–1814), and Spain now lagged badly behind the rest of Europe, which was rapidly modernizing.⁹ Spain was again fighting a war on its own soil as conservative opposition to the liberal rule of Regent Maria Cristina sparked the first of three civil conflicts known as the Carlist Wars. The combination of Spain’s tenuous hold on its home front and remaining colonies led to a nearly fourfold increase in its standing army between 1828 and 1838, much of it fueled by forced conscription from the provinces.¹⁰

Mariano’s choice to pursue a military career thus proved a wise decision, as the army provided the young man with a lifestyle, education, and class status his elder brothers were never to achieve. Surely the military held more promise for a young man of the time than the prospect of a lifetime carrying bales of hemp for his father’s rope-making business. A tailor by trade, Mariano could have left for the city, as two of his brothers eventually did, in hopes of finding work or opening his own shop.¹¹ Yet Mariano chose military life for reasons not entirely financial. It is especially telling that Mariano was the only one of six Martí siblings who learned to read and write. Having received by all accounts the same upbringing as his male siblings and given the sorry state of primary education throughout Spain at the time, it is reasonable to speculate that perhaps he became literate only after joining the army.¹²

Whatever his reasons for enlisting beyond the prospect of steady employment, Mariano quickly took to military life and was soon promoted to the rank of corporal. After an initial period in his native Valencia, Mariano was transferred in 1844 to Barcelona, where Spain had put down a second Carlist uprising two years earlier. His performance in the artillery corps led to his promotion to the rank of first sergeant in 1850.¹³

Shortly after his promotion, Mariano’s artillery unit joined a larger contingent of four infantry battalions and additional squadrons, and all were then transferred to Havana after the failed invasion of the island in May by Narciso López, a disgruntled former general.¹⁴ As with Mariano’s enlistment, the timing of his promotion and transfer had a great deal to do with larger forces at work in Spain and its colonies. For decades the English government had pressured Spain to abolish slavery in its remaining colonies, a move strongly opposed by the island’s plantation-owning elite, or plantocracy. The plantocracy depended on slave labor for the economic viability of the sugar industry as well as the relatively smaller tobacco and coffee trades.

For this reason the Spanish government had long been ambivalent about slavery in the colonies, agreeing only reluctantly—and under intense pressure from England—to outlaw the slave trade in 1817.¹⁵ The government’s enforcement of the slaving prohibition was half-hearted at best, and slavery itself remained legal in the colonies, yet island elites grew increasingly nervous about their economic future. After two decades of ongoing tension between the plantocracy and the mother country on the subject of slavery, Cuba’s official exclusion in 1837 from representation in the Spanish court proved the final straw.

From that point on, the island elites became attracted to the idea of annexation to the United States, where slavery seemed much more likely to survive.¹⁶ The feeling was apparently mutual, as the U.S. government—specifically the successive administrations of James Polk and Zachary Taylor—made direct offers to buy the island outright from Spain.¹⁷ Neither the Cuban nor U.S. plantocracies, however, were content to watch events unfold from the sidelines. Prominent planters from both camps were prepared to finance a private filibustering expedition—essentially a mercenary invasion force—to topple the colonial Cuban government and pave the way for U.S. acquisition. The plantocracies possessed the means and motivation for an invasion, and it did not take long before a suitable candidate emerged to lead it.

General Narciso López was Venezuelan by birth and enlisted in the Spanish army against Simón Bolivar’s insurgent forces in 1814 at the age of sixteen. He rose quickly through the ranks, and by the time Bolivar’s forces prevailed in 1823, the young man was a colonel. Forced to leave his native country along with the Spanish, he relocated first to Spain, where he fought in the First Carlist War, then to Cuba. For a time López’s loyalty to Spain paid ample dividends: he married into a wealthy Cuban family, was promoted to general, and served in a string of government posts. As a liberal, however, he suddenly found himself out of favor with the rise of a center-right, moderate government in 1843. López’s sudden estrangement—he retained his rank as general but no longer had any official duties—engendered a deep resentment toward the empire he had served for nearly thirty years. After he suffered a number of failed business ventures, López’s dwindling fortunes and lasting bitterness turned him against his erstwhile masters; he fled to the United States in 1848 and sought out parties to bankroll an expeditionary force.¹⁸

By the time of Mariano’s arrival in Havana in the summer of 1850, López had tried and failed twice to capture Cuba. In August of the following year, Mariano would help defend Cuba against López’s third and final attempt on the island.¹⁹ His superiors duly noted the valor, energy, and zeal he displayed during the crisis, qualities that would eventually enable Mariano to rise into the officers’ ranks.

For now, however, his escape from hunger and poverty and into a promising new life seemed more than enough. First Sergeant Mariano Martí was a thirty-five-year-old career soldier who finally began to glimpse the life he may have envisioned when he enlisted as a young man. An enlisted man’s salary in the colonial army was more valuable for its regularity than for its size. Even so, shortly after his arrival in Cuba, Mariano was financially comfortable for the first time in his life, thanks in part to a bonus he received for meritorious service during the last Narciso López filibuster. Mariano displayed an interest in business during this time: aside from his regular salary he enjoyed some income from two businesses he acquired, a barbershop and a small café named La Fuente de la Salud (Fountain of Health).²⁰

Given thirty-six-year-old Mariano’s newfound affluence and relatively advanced age for a bachelor, he unsurprisingly set about to find himself a wife. Little is known about Mariano Martí’s romantic or sexual life before this point in his life. Apparently he made no move toward serious courtship and marriage until he became financially and professionally secure, suggesting a man who wanted to marry well, within the restrictions imposed by his rank and class, and was willing to wait until he could attract a socially appropriate spouse. Such a match would be the crowning achievement of a lifelong struggle to overcome the station of his birth. A wife with social and economic status would be the affirmation of Mariano’s material, social, and personal success.

For Mariano, Leonor Perez was the perfect match. Leonor was a young, beautiful, intelligent, and well-mannered woman from a military family whose two elder sisters already were married to career soldiers. Mariano and Leonor met at one of the weekly dances held at a downtown ballroom in the old city that provided a venue for the social debuts of daughters of middle-class colonials before potential suitors. Mariano Martí, a good-looking man splendidly attired in full military-dress uniform, would have made a deep and immediate impression on young Leonor despite his average height and build.²¹ Mariano’s charms proved as irresistible for the Pérez family as for Leonor. Having secured his commanding officer’s permission and Antonio Perez’s blessing, the couple became formally engaged on January 19, 1852, and were married less than three weeks later, on the sunny but slightly chilly morning of Saturday, February 7.²² After the ceremony, the newlyweds retired to their new home on Calle Paula, where less than a year later José Martí was born.

BY THE TIME OF JOSÉ MARTÍ’S BIRTH, CUBA HAD BEEN A Spanish possession for nearly 350 years. As the economic and political center of the island colony, Havana showed little sign of the restlessness that would soon strain its relations with the mother country. The colony’s native elites had lost their taste for López-style filibustering, and after his capture and public execution following his third attempt they displayed little appetite for continued agitation. Others on the island who continued to advocate either independence or annexation to the United States had, like López, also been silenced by execution or exile.²³ Despite the independence movements that had swept the Latin American continent earlier in the century and continuing international pressure, especially from England, for Spain to abolish slavery in its remaining colonies, Cuba appeared on the surface every bit the placid, contented Ever-Faithful Isle (Siempre-Fidelísima Isla) in an otherwise troubled empire.²⁴

In 1853 Havana was a bustling, cosmopolitan city of about 200,000 inhabitants characterized as much by its busy international trade, political clout, and displays of military might as by its lively nightlife and thriving arts and social scene. The vast majority of its population, however, could only enjoy the city’s many charms from a distance, as these remained strictly the province of the wealthy plantocracy and merchant classes and to a lesser extent those in the military.

The island’s Creole elites continued to suppress the immutable tension between material wealth and political subjugation that defined their class. Their awareness of the recent winds of liberalizing political change that had swept Europe and blown as far as their erstwhile colonial peers on the Latin American continent only heightened their untenable position as affluent but second-class citizens.²⁵ Thus on the day of Martí’s birth, local newspapers could announce on the same page and without any notable sense of contradiction the schedule of theatrical premieres and social balls for carnival season alongside the arrival of vaccinations against cholera, which was still running rampant throughout the island.²⁶ Into this web of contradictions, of surface gaiety and calm veiling a growing sense of unease, was born the first child and only son of Mariano and Leonor Martí.

Part One

BEFORE THE FALL (1853–1870)

CHAPTER ONE

An Unlikely Prodigy

Well: the times are bad, but your son is good.

LETTER TO LEONOR MARTÍ, 1892

And from whom did I learn my integrity and my rebelliousness, or from whom could I have inherited them, if not from my father and from my mother?

LETTER TO LEONOR MARTÍ, MAY 15, 1894

JOSÉ MARTÍ’S FIRST DECADE OF LIFE WAS A LARGELY UNEVENTFUL one, a good thing in a city where one in ten inhabitants—and a disproportionate number of children—died of yellow fever.¹ The precarious state of the island’s sanitation and its nearly nonexistent health-care system were further taxed by the return of cholera, which reached pandemic proportions during the 1850s.²

Childhood anecdotes suggest that José was a sensitive, well-behaved child who gave his parents no cause for particular concern. By his tenth birthday, José Martí—or Pepe, as his parents called him—began to show the first signs of his prodigious intellectual and literary talent. Both of his parents had managed to acquire levels of education beyond what was typical—or in Leonor’s case, even encouraged—for Spaniards of their respective backgrounds and classes. They grasped the value of enabling Pepe’s education as far as their limited means allowed, although they would come to differ sharply over what kinds of learning and how much was best. Neither his parents’ education nor their enthusiasm for his own, however, could account for the child’s spectacular record of achievement in school or his apparently immense capacity for intellectual work.

Given the class-bound nature of Cuba’s and Spain’s educational systems and the chronic lack of opportunity of advancement for all but the upper crust of Creole society, a more unlikely origin could hardly be imagined for the child who would become one of Latin America’s most revered political and literary figures.

During José Martí’s infancy, his father’s military career continued to prosper. On February 14, 1855, Mariano was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. This boon was largely due to a personality exceptionally well suited to the requirements of the times: unwavering loyalty to the mother country, boundless energy, and a mental toughness that appealed to his superiors. Spain needed such men to safeguard the precarious colonial situation in Cuba. The landed elites’ latent anticolonial feelings never completely dissipated after the López debacle, and the colonial government found itself constantly on guard against new potential uprisings. Given the burgeoning U.S. empire’s growing ambitions in the Caribbean and Spain’s corresponding decline, many Creoles believed annexation to the United States was inevitable and perhaps even desirable.³ It was, in short, an opportune time for ambitious and fiercely loyal Spaniards to find their enthusiasm amply rewarded by the Spanish crown.

Yet the events that led to and in fact necessitated Mariano Martí’s promotion were far from ideal. The appointment in 1853 of Marqués Juan de la Pezuela, an avowed abolitionist, as captain-general and thus supreme military and civilian authority of Cuba fueled a renewed economic anxiety among the plantocracy, who depended on slavery for their economic and political survival. The planters’ fears of economic and political disaster triggered a return to the general unrest and annexationist pressures that had facilitated Mariano’s arrival five years earlier. By February 1854 the U.S. government, emboldened by Cuban planters’ urgent petitions and Spain’s increasingly precarious position, made renewed offers to buy the embattled colony, and Cuban exiles were lobbying powerful U.S. Southern politicians such as Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman to organize a new filibustering effort.⁴ The government in Madrid itself was nearly toppled in June but managed to restore order within a few weeks.⁵

Pezuela responded to the rapidly escalating tensions on the island with a sharp increase in military activity. All forces on the island, including Mariano’s unit, kept constant vigilance against actual or perceived threats with orders to crush any uprising or invasion.

The birth of a second child, Leonor Petrona, whom the family called Chata, in July put increased financial pressure on the Martí family that Mariano’s promotion the following year undoubtedly helped assuage. Yet the new husband and father soon tired of the chronic state of alert in which he lived. The unflagging vigilance and permanent state of readiness demanded of his unit in turn required never-ending rounds of drills and maneuvers that kept Mariano away from Havana and his family for extended periods. News of his mother’s death in Valencia in 1855, coupled with Leonor’s becoming pregnant with their third child, further taxed the once steadfast, even enthusiastic soldier and family man. He wore slowly but inexorably down under the professional and emotional strain. On December 22 Mariano received an early Christmas present: his request to resign his commission and retire from the army was granted.⁶

Shortly after the birth on June 8, 1856, of the couple’s third child, Mariana, whom they called Ana, the Martís moved to a larger house; José Martí was three years old. With the new baby came increased economic pressures on Mariano, prompting the now ex-soldier to seek employment in the civilian ranks. His military experience and lifelong loyalty to the mother country made him a seemingly ideal candidate for a position in the Carabineros, the colonial national police. Despite Mariano’s long and meritorious service, his desired position among the aventajados, an elite corps of troopers, did not materialize. The family remained hopeful, as Mariano was in line for a much-coveted position as chief inspector of Templete, the city’s main commercial district and home of the colonial government offices.⁷

The family soon moved again, this time to a house in Templete. But before Mariano could formally claim the position, his candidacy had to endure the slow grind of Havana’s formidable colonial bureaucracy. In the meantime, it became clear that the income from Mariano’s café and barbershop, which he only ever meant to supplement his military salary, would not cover the family’s needs. To keep the family financially afloat until her husband could start his new job, Leonor began working at home as a seamstress in addition to her household duties. The months that followed were hard ones for the Martí family. But finally, Mariano again received an early Christmas present: an official notice to report to his new post as chief inspector of Templete district.⁸

Although chief inspectors occupied a relatively minor position within the larger civil and military hierarchy, they wielded significant power over the lives of Cuban civilians. Cubans generally considered the local chief inspector as an arm of the colonizer, not an unreasonable view given that inspectors’ ranks were almost entirely composed of Spaniards and most of them former soldiers. At least one observer of the time described the chief inspector’s power as equal parts bureaucrat and colonial spy:

Families are obliged to give notice to the celador [chief inspector], or alderman of their locality, of the increase or diminution of the family, of the admission of a new inmate, or of a guest, of a change of living, and of whatever reunion or party they may celebrate in their house, thus subjecting the whole country to a complete system of espionage.⁹

Chief inspectors were the first line of enforcement for construction permits and business licenses as well as keeping roadways safe and clear for city traffic.¹⁰ Their most visible function on the streets, however, was to be seen as a deterrent to criminal activity; an effective chief inspector knew that beyond his physical presence in the neighborhood, it was his image in the minds of the civilian population that served to maintain public order and deter potential miscreants. Walking his beat as a Havana chief inspector, Mariano for a time embraced his duties as public officer and private spy, playing his public visuals especially well, as José Martí’s childhood friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez would later reminisce:

[Mariano] was, then, one of those agents of the law who, when he walked the streets with his two bodyguards behind him, would strike fear into the criminals, when these were not themselves collaborating with him in the persecution of some Cuban opposing the despots or an enemy of the slave traders.¹¹

Mariano’s initial success as a chief inspector gave the Martís hope of better times to come. The new position enabled a return to financial stability for the Martí family, and the Templete district’s wealth of potential business and government contacts held the promise of further professional and personal advancement. Unfortunately, Mariano displayed no particular talent for professional or social networking, his successful courtship of Leonor notwithstanding, and had risen through the army ranks more by dint of persistence and sheer ambition than by personal charm. The martial air and personal brusqueness that served him well as a soldier would have made him a very effective chief inspector in a different part of the city but actually proved a hindrance in Templete, where he interacted with government bureaucrats and merchants unfamiliar with the rigidities of military life. It did not take the new chief inspector long to make enemies among both the people he policed and his own colleagues.

Worse, at the age of forty-one the physical robustness that had been one of Mariano’s greatest assets began to fail him. Given that life expectancy for Cuban men at this time hovered between thirty-five and forty years, it was not surprising for a man of Mariano’s age and work history to experience a decline in health.¹² Unlike other men at his stage of life, however, Mariano had three young children to support and was beginning a new position he could ill afford to lose after a lengthy unemployment. The specific nature of Mariano’s malaise is as puzzling as its timing was unfortunate, as Martí biographers have been unable to identify a specific illness or other direct cause for it. Yet Mariano’s libido seemed unaffected, as Leonor became pregnant with their fourth child during this period.¹³ This and the absence of any identifiable illness or disorder suggest the possibility of a psychological rather than physical cause for his waning health. Whatever the cause, Mariano Martí found himself out of his element not only socially and professionally but now also physically, while his sense of professional and familial duty demanded that he remain at his post until a new opportunity emerged.

With the new year came the opening Mariano had been hoping for if not actively seeking. In January 1857 the couple learned of the death of Antonio Pérez, Leonor’s father, who had returned to Spain shortly after Leonor’s marriage. Having retired from the army, the Pérez family patriarch then decided to return to the Canary Islands, where he owned land and could live a quieter life away from rising political tensions in Cuba. Upon his death, his estate was to be distributed among his wife and children, a prospect that prompted the Martís to consider following Pérez’s lead and relocating to the mother country. The decision could not have been an easy one. A voyage of this magnitude required a significant amount of money that Mariano could likely raise only by selling off most of his business interests, which by now included two slaves he bought as part of a short-lived foray into tobacco farming.¹⁴

The prospect of staking almost all of their financial resources on the move was an enormous gamble for the family, one made even more daunting by the complexity of planning and undertaking it with three small children. Mariano’s own fitness for the transatlantic voyage—an average of ten weeks by sail—must also have given them pause, although Leonor’s pregnancy in March suggests that perhaps his physical condition was less of an issue than Martí biographers generally assert.¹⁵

Despite all of these concerns, the promise of an easier, more affluent life proved irresistible to Mariano. On May 3, after less than six months on the job as chief inspector of Templete, a span shorter than the time it took him to get the position, he submitted his letter of resignation, citing his desire to return to Spain to recover from an unspecified illness.¹⁶

In June the Martí family—Mariano, Leonor (now four months pregnant), Pepe, Chata, and Ana—boarded the Magdalena, a Spanish merchant ship bound for Valencia. Soon after the seventy-five-day voyage they settled into a rented flat on Calle Tapineria where the couple’s fourth child, María del Carmen, was born. Despite the substantial expense of the move and perhaps due to an actual or anticipated financial windfall from Leonor’s inheritance, the Martís hired a domestic servant they never could have afforded in Cuba.¹⁷ Their all-or-nothing bet on a better life appeared, at least initially, to be paying off.

But before long, the family’s situation started going badly. Leonor had spent her entire life in the tropical climates of Cuba and the Canary Islands, and she did not take well to the relative chill of the Valencia winters. Despite Valencia’s more temperate weather by Spanish standards, Leonor soon began suffering from chilblains (perniosis) on her hands, a painful itching and swelling associated with exposure to cold, damp conditions.¹⁸ This, along with Leonor’s late-pregnancy fatigue and Mariano’s diminished physical state, made their first months on the peninsula difficult ones. Leonor began to struggle emotionally after the birth of María del Carmen on December 2. Feeling physically and culturally uprooted, she began to withdraw from her husband’s family and even her own children.¹⁹

The Martís’ relations with Mariano’s Spanish relatives also may have soured during their stay.²⁰ His father had remarried since his mother’s death, and Mariano had not seen his father or siblings since his departure for Cuba seven years earlier. The retired military officer who greeted them now was a profoundly changed man—physically reduced but no less martial in his manner or unbending in his ways. Leonor failed to establish any lasting bond with Mariano’s extended family due perhaps to their resentment of her relatively superior class status and/or education. It is possible that the Spanish colonial cultural logic of the time, according to which peninsula-born Spaniards considered themselves culturally and even racially superior to Creoles, played a significant role in the extended family’s disapproval of the island-born Leonor regardless of her class or education.²¹

Aside from María del Carmen’s birth, little is known about the Martís’ twenty-two-month stay in Valencia.²² There is no record of Mariano having sought or failed to find work, either in the police or anywhere else, nor is there evidence of his having pursued business interests. It is thus likely that the family supported itself with the funds from Leonor’s inheritance along with whatever savings they brought with them. Mariano’s health during this time showed significant improvement over his earlier condition; among other indicators, Leonor had become pregnant once again. By the spring of 1859 the money was running out, the Martís tired of Valencia, or both. Whatever the reasons, Mariano and Leonor again staked much of their now-dwindling fortunes on a transatlantic voyage back to Cuba and the promise of employment.

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the Martís’ venture in Valencia on their material well-being and, more ominously, the emotional and psychological ties that bound them. Beyond leaving the family practically penniless, the failed expedition demoralized them. For Mariano it meant the end of his dreams of a comfortable retirement and the grim realization that he would have to spend the rest of his days—or as long as his health and body held out—working for his family’s survival. This was enough to light a spark of frustration and resentment that with future setbacks and indignities would grow into the chronic anger and bouts of rage that would eventually render him unemployable. For Leonor, her relief at having escaped an emotionally and physically trying situation in Valencia was tempered by deep concern for her husband’s future health and ability to support the family.²³ Although they could not have known it at the time, the Martís’ Spanish misadventure marked only the beginning of the family’s slow but inexorable decline, neither the last nor the greatest misfortune they would